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During the greater part of the twentieth-century the Irish State owned
and managed a prison system for children spread across the whole
of the Republic. The children in these institutions were described as
being in care; in reality these institutions constituted an ‘Irish Gulag’.
Victims were summarily parted from their parents and their families. They were deprived of their names and identities, of contact with the outside world, and of their rights under the Constitution and the law of the land. In all this their fate was parallel with what happened to millions of Russians judged by the Soviet system to be enemies of the state.
Chairman of the Commission to Inquire in to Child Abuse, Judge Sean Ryan, publishes his report on Wednesday next at 2.30pm. This commission was set up by Bertie Ahern following the States of Fear documentaries in 1999 and his public apology to those who suffered. The primary focus was to give victims the opportunity to tell the story of the abuse they suffered, to provide a complete picture of the nature and extent of the abuse and to make recommendations as it saw fit. But what is the point of this report if it never touched on the most important question of all? That is, why the government has never taken responsibility for allowing the system to run and for allowing a non-stop supply line of children to troop into these places of misery and damage.
The Irish Gulag is a grim story involving a culpable State machinery. Much of what the State did, and allowed to be done in their name and under their control, requires close and careful examination. To date, in telling the tale of the horrors of the industrial school system, the emphasis has been on the stories of the abused. The relentless nature of these revelations set aside the State’s responsibility. With the threat of legal action from people inside the prison system growing, this was a welcome distortion of reality as far as they were concerned.
Bruce Arnold is a journalist of some experience. He has supped on political horrors and confronted chicanery and duplicity, but nothing he has experienced comes near to challenging the deep dishonesty of the supposed recompense offered to victims of the Irish Gulag. These victims were not imprisoned by religious orders but by the State. It was they who had the power to impose restraint and protect the children yet they did not do so. Innocent children suffered years of unspeakable torment at their hands but instead of being held accountable for this the State have repeatedly managed to shirk the responsibility.
This failure to do anything should have been at the centre of Bertie Ahern’s apology in 1999. Why it was not is the subject of this book.
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